Sean Grayson, who killed Sonya Massey, committed misconduct at prior jobs. Another one of his cases just got dropped – IPM Newsroom

This story is a collaboration between Invisible Institute and IPM News

On a hot summer day in August, Chelsey Lowe sat in a maroon dress on a bench in the Logan County Courthouse.

Her lawyer had instructed her to arrive early, but she waited nearly three hours before she was called into the courtroom. Inside, a county judge dismissed the nearly two-year-old case against Lowe, which stemmed from her 2022 arrest by then-Logan County Sheriff’s Deputy Sean Grayson.

Just a few months earlier, Lowe had been convicted in the case of charges including possession of methamphetamine, facing a potential prison sentence of up to 20 years.

As Lowe left the courtroom on August 27, the judge advised her to take the second chance she had been given. 

“Ms. Lowe, it’s an opportunity,” the judge said. 

“I know,” Lowe said. 

“Take advantage of it,” the judge responded. 

“I will.” 

Lowe was in disbelief.

“I can’t tell you how it feels right now,” Lowe said in an interview days later. “My dad said… I am the luckiest unlucky person in the world.”

The reason why her case was dropped wasn’t mentioned on the record during the brief court hearing. The judge didn’t ask, and the attorneys didn’t offer. Nor were the serious allegations Lowe had made against Grayson discussed. 

Following her 2022 arrest, Lowe filed a complaint alleging that Grayson acted inappropriately while she was in custody—first, by ordering her to remove drugs from inside her body in front of him and another male officer before a female officer stepped in; and later, by pulling back the curtains around her hospital bed, exposing her.

Lowe said she was never interviewed and later learned her complaint was deemed unfounded. The department did not return any records outlining the investigative steps that were taken to reach that conclusion. Legal experts interviewed by Invisible Institute and IPM News said the Logan County Sheriff’s Office’s report shows a failure to investigate Lowe’s allegations fully. 

The killing of Sonya Massey by Sean Grayson, who moved on from Logan County in 2023 to become a Sangamon County Sheriff’s deputy, prompted nationwide outrage this summer. Grayson shot and killed Massey — an unarmed Black woman — in her home after responding to her call for help.

Grayson has been charged with murder, and departments where he previously worked have taken steps to distance themselves from the disgraced officer, whose long history of problematic behavior has come to light since Massey’s death. During his time at the Logan County Sheriff’s Office, Grayson’s supervisors repeatedly questioned his conduct, citing a pattern of questionable arrests and cases that were later dropped—misconduct that traced back to his previous policing roles. 

Some legal experts wonder if that’s what prompted the Logan County judge to drop Lowe’s case, although we don’t know for sure; Neither her defense lawyer nor the Logan County State’s Attorney’s Office responded to questions about the case.

Regardless, Lowe feels her experience illustrates a problem of inaction — a missed opportunity for Grayson to be stopped before going on to do much worse.

“If they had done their job and held him accountable, [Sonya Massey] might still be alive today. They didn’t do nothing,” she said.

‘He took advantage of his power’ 

In October 2022, Sean Grayson was in his fifth month of service with the Logan County Sheriff’s Office — his fifth law enforcement agency since he was hired by the tiny Pawnee Police Department in August 2020, despite being discharged from the U.S. Army four years earlier for “serious misconduct.”

On the night of October 3, 2022, he pulled over the 1997 Chevrolet Lumina whose passengers included Lowe, her then-boyfriend George Wisehart and two of their friends, who were traveling together from Champaign to Lincoln to purchase a large quantity of methamphetamines. Lowe said they planned to stock up on the drug for personal use and to give small amounts to friends.

Lowe, originally from Le Roy, a small city in McLean County, said she didn’t usually go through Logan County, which Lincoln is the county seat of, but this night was an exception.

“I had a bad feeling the whole time,” she said. “I said we shouldn’t do it.” 

When the group stopped at a gas station, Lowe noticed Grayson parked in his squad car nearby. 

“I tell the people I’m with, like, ‘Look, we should not leave. If we leave, that cop is going to pull us over,” Lowe said. “I already knew it.”

According to Grayson’s narrative, he observed “the front two passengers to look over at me with wide eyes and open mouths as if they were scared.” Grayson wrote in his report that he saw a white residue in a clear glass jar in the glove compartment when he looked into the car from the driver’s side window as the car’s occupants were getting the insurance information. 

Lowe disputes Grayson’s justification for the stop — that the driver of the car had failed to use a turn signal, which no video evidence exists to support — but during the stop, in a panic, she inserted a large bag of methamphetamines inside herself. 

“He stopped us because he wanted us,” she said. “He wanted the drug bust, and he got it.”

During the stop, Grayson let Lowe exit the squad car and removed her handcuffs. But after she got out, another Logan County Sheriff’s deputy told Grayson he found a glass vial of a white crystal substance and drug residue in the back seat where Lowe had been sitting. 

Deputies, including Grayson, arrested Lowe and took her to the Logan County Jail. 

While in the intake area of the jail, she said Grayson ordered her to remove the drugs she had hidden while in the presence of him and another male officer. “It did not matter if it was against my will or it was against my Constitutional rights. It didn’t matter if it was against anything — because he was in uniform,” Lowe said. 

“If I didn’t do what he wanted me to do, he was going to make everything that much worse for me. And he has, because now here I am, and I’m looking at six to 30 years in prison,” she said in an interview before her case was dropped. She said a female correctional officer came out and stopped her before she could attempt to remove the drugs. In response to a request for video footage of the interaction in the intake area, the department said none existed.

Photo credit: Farrah Anderson for Invisible Institute and IPM News

The female officer took Lowe to a private area to attempt to remove the drugs, but she was unsuccessful. Lowe was then taken to Lincoln Memorial Hospital. While she was in a gown lying in a hospital bed, waiting to be seen by a doctor, she says that Grayson ripped the hospital bed’s curtains open, again exposing her to himself and another male officer.

“Next thing I know, the curtain flies back, and there’s Officer Grayson,” Lowe said. “Immediately the doctor grabbed the curtain because [Grayson] saw me [and] my vagina, like everybody saw, and I’m crying, I’m upset. And so [the doctor] pulled the curtain back, and he says, ‘I will let you know when I am finished. Do not do that again.’” 

The hospital system did not respond to a request for comment.

Lowe submitted a complaint about Grayson’s behavior to the Logan County Sheriff’s Office on December 23, 2022. She said she was never interviewed or notified about any next steps, and never even received confirmation that her complaint was received. 

“Nobody listened,” Lowe said. “My rights were violated and they did nothing about it.” 

“I felt very violated on both occasions and was unsure how to handle this matter until now,” she wrote in her complaint to the department, later adding: “Officer Grayson was out of line and used his title to act inappropriately with me.”

According to records from the Logan County Sheriff’s Office, the allegations in Lowe’s complaint were deemed “unfounded,” and Grayson was trained on “best practices.”

A couple of weeks later, just after the New Year, George Wisehart, Lowe’s then-fiancé, who was also being detained at the Logan County Jail, filed a complaint accusing Grayson of “abusing his power and harassing me” in retaliation for his fiancée’s complaint. In the complaint, Wisehart alleges that Grayson visited him at the Logan County Jail and told him another man had bailed Lowe out. 

There is no record of how Wisehart’s complaint was investigated either. As with Lowe’s complaint, the only document showing any investigative steps taken by the Logan County Sheriff’s Office was a memo written by Grayson himself, denying harassing Wisehart, but promising at the same time not to have contact with either Lowe or Wisehart again. 

Logan County officials promised harsher penalties for drugs 

Lowe, who is now 34 and has a 9-year-old son, has been in several abusive relationships throughout her life. She said she’s been in and out of active addiction to various substances since she was young — from alcohol as a teenager to, eventually, after she started dating Wisehart, meth. Her drug use was largely coupled to the relationship she was in at the time, she said. 

Wisehart, who is now 47 and grew up in Homer, a village between Champaign and Danville, had struggled with addiction and been arrested many times because of his drug use, according to his sister, Geani Clark, who said she talks on the phone with him regularly while he awaits trial for another case. 

When he announced his candidacy in 2019, Republican Logan County State’s Attorney Bradley Hauge said in a statement that he intended to make prosecuting drug dealing offenses one of his “highest priorities.” 

“I have seen drugs tear families apart, making it unfortunately necessary for children to be separated from parents,” Hauge wrote. “Drug dealers will be treated harsher for their role in the drug trades because they seek to profit from poisoning our community. Selling drugs is inexcusable and cannot be justified in any way.” 

The year before, in a candidate questionnaire for the Lincoln Courier, Mark Landers, then running on the Republican ticket for sheriff, said that “the most pressing issue in Logan County is the distribution and use of illegal drugs.” He said he supports drug courts for users, but that “we will certainly continue to arrest drug dealers who wish to push these poisons in our communities.”

Lowe denies that she intended to sell any of the drugs that were found on her — arguing instead that she was struggling with addiction personally. But, because of the amount that was found at the time of her arrest, officers like Grayson assumed she was a dealer. 

“I was a drug addict in a very abusive relationship,” she said. “That’s what it was, and I was in a bad spot at a bad time, and I got caught with it.”

Ben Ruddell, the director of criminal justice policy for the ACLU of Illinois, said there is still an ongoing “war on drugs” in Illinois in the form of laws still on the books that allow for wide discretion about whether to charge someone with possession or intent to deliver — which could be the difference between years or decades in prison. He said meth cases are able to be charged even more harshly than cases involving other substances. 

“We have never had any meaningful sentencing reform for drugs, with the exception of cannabis,” he said, “and we have elected officials who walk around talking about [how] we’re repairing the harm of the war on drugs. Nothing drives me crazier than hearing that, because you can’t repair the harm if you’re still fighting the war, and we most definitely are still fighting the war on drugs here in Illinois. We have not stopped.”

Logan County could have reported Grayson’s behavior to the state, but they didn’t 

The Logan County Sheriff’s Office’s response to Lowe’s complaint was deficient on several levels, according to legal experts interviewed by Invisible Institute and IPM News.

In her complaint, Lowe referenced the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), a federal law passed in 2003. Under PREA, local jails, like the one in Logan County, are obligated to investigate all claims of sexual harassment, which should include interviews with all parties and fully documented written reports, among other standards set out by the U.S. Department of Justice. The Logan County Sheriff’s Office has a policy for complying with some aspects of PREA, but it does not outline how investigations should be conducted.

Outside of Lowe’s mention of the law, no references to PREA appear in any of the documents about her complaint — but hers clearly falls under the law, according to Julie Abbate, the national advocacy director for Just Detention International, a nonprofit that works to end sexual abuse and harassment in prisons and jails. 

Abbate, who is a certified PREA auditor and previously worked in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, said that the “cross-gender” nature of Lowe’s allegations “absolutely” bring them under PREA standards. She said the department’s documented investigation in the case was “egregious in its lack of anything investigatory at all,” but added that there is no enforcement mechanism to ensure local jails comply with PREA.

“Asking any member of the opposite sex, assuming binary genders, to disrobe in front of you in any way is a complete violation of, not just PREA, but really, good correctional practices that have existed for a long time,” she continued. She said that all parties — Lowe, Grayson, other deputies, doctors and nurses at the hospital — should have been sought out for documented interviews, and that the Logan County Sheriff’s Office’s PREA policy is simply “a bizarrely organized regurgitation of some of the PREA Standards” that “isn’t helpful in practice.”

The failure to interview Lowe — and the acceptance of a mere written report from Grayson — does not reflect general best police practices, either, according to Ashley Heiberger, a retired police captain from Pennsylvania who now works as an independent police practices expert.

“An investigator should attempt to interview all witnesses with knowledge relevant to the allegation,” Heiberger wrote after reviewing the reports. “In particular, failing to attempt to contact a complainant regarding an interview is a significant lapse.” 

Without taking those steps, the ultimate determination of “unfounded” is also improper, he wrote. “The ‘unfounded’ disposition is used only when an alleged incident did not occur.… It would be inappropriate to deem an allegation unfounded without interviewing the complainant and the involved officer.”

The fact that Lowe had drugs with her shouldn’t diminish the seriousness of the complaint, he continued: “An agency should investigate complaints made by people with substance abuse issues or criminal histories regardless of their individual situations. While it is certainly appropriate during the process to examine the credibility of all witnesses, every allegation must be investigated.”

He found that the documents that were released by the sheriff’s office don’t show steps that he said an “appropriate investigation” should include — crucially, a final written report and log documenting each investigative step taken. The fact that the Logan County Sheriff’s Office is a smaller agency shouldn’t impact the quality of its investigation. 

“Almost all agencies are operating under staffing constraints, and these types of investigations take time and resources,” Heiberger wrote. “However, there are basic standards that need to be met, including the creation of an investigative file for each complaint. Compliance with such a foundational requirement is not too much to ask.”

The notation that Grayson had been “trained on best practices” also doesn’t comport with what’s actually in the records. If the allegations were indeed true, then Grayson needed punishment, not training. “In many situations relating to minor misconduct, counseling and remedial training can be a form of non-punitive discipline that improves officer performance,” he wrote.

“However, the related documentation should reflect details such as who provided the training, the duration of the training, and what training methods and resources were used. To be clear, counseling and remedial training are not substitutes for punitive discipline when more serious misconduct is established.”

Heiberger also reviewed records relating to a high-speed pursuit Grayson initiated a few weeks after arresting Lowe. Grayson said his reason for attempting to stop the car, and eventually chasing it at speeds of nearly 120 miles per hour — eventually hitting a deer — was that he saw the driver slide down suspiciously in her seat.

In his investigation into the incident, Logan County Chief Deputy Nathan Miller interviewed Grayson. The recording of the exchange shows Miller repeatedly implied that Grayson had a history of dishonesty. Miller also raised serious questions about the veracity of the report Grayson had written about the chase. 

Miller referred to Giglio v. U.S., a U.S. Supreme Court decision requiring prosecutors to turn over evidence that could show a pattern of dishonesty by law enforcement officers involved in a criminal case to defense attorneys.

“We have never had a deputy Giglio’d,” Miller said. “We have never had a problem with our state’s attorney on integrity.”

Yet, in his final report, Miller failed to mention these serious issues that could be used by a defense attorney in court to call the truthfulness of Grayson’s testimony into question. The final report simply states that “Deputy Grayson appeared to be honest during his interview and definitely acknowledged his inability to recall from memory alone,” and recommended training on “high stress decision making.”

That outcome seems to serve not only to protect Grayson’s reputation, but also the Sheriff’s Office’s, civil rights attorney Amanda Yarusso previously told Invisible Institute and IPM News. “If someone wants to dig deeper into the paper trail, they’re not going to realize the seriousness of the problem,” she said. “That’s how we get to this point of having officers carrying weapons who are a complete danger to people of color and the sort of people who officers are always targeting.”

The failure to report information about Grayson’s truthfulness presents a “huge gap in the Brady disclosure system and a major obstacle to accountability and fairness,” said Rachel Moran in an interview with Invisible Institute and IPM News about issues with Grayson’s credibility in another case. Moran is a law professor who studies prosecutors’ obligations under Giglio and its related cases, including Brady v. Maryland.

“In practice, prosecutors frequently wouldn’t know about this past misconduct, probably wouldn’t ask Deputy Grayson about it, and therefore would unwittingly violate Brady by not disclosing the information they don’t know about. And unless defense counsel has some way to unearth this information, they won’t know about it either and thus won’t call the prosecutor out for failing to disclose it,” she said.

Heiberger also said the car chase itself violated general policing best practices that have been in place since the 1990s, in that Grayson failed to balance the danger posed by the suspect escaping against the danger caused by his initiation of a high-speed pursuit. Beyond that, he wrote that Grayson had failed to justify any pursuit at all, writing that the deputy never articulated “reasonably perceiv[ing] a serious crime.”

Heiberger found there to be a “significant disconnect between the tone of” Chief Deputy Miller’s interview, and the “ultimate resolution” of the investigation. As in the case with Lowe, “the issues raised during the interview should have generated more significant action than non-punitive discipline, i.e., counseling and remedial training,” he wrote.

Records released by the Logan County Sheriff’s Office show that Sheriff Mark Landers took action against Miller shortly after the killing of Sonya Massey, opening an investigation that asserted Miller had never shared the recording or contents of the interview with him.

“You failed to report the violations of Logan County Policy violations you alleged related to integrity and truthfulness to the Sheriff,” Landers wrote in his complaint, dated July 31. “You did not notify the Sheriff of the audio recordings of the interview [until] sometime between Monday, July 8, 2024 and Wednesday, July 10, 2024. You did not give the Sheriff a copy of the audio recordings until Thursday, July 18, 2024. At no time did you notify the Sheriff of the contents of the audio recording.”

Miller, who joined the Logan County Sheriff’s Office in 2022 after a long career with the Illinois State Police, resigned before the investigation could be completed. In a letter dated August 5, he wrote that he was tendering his resignation “for personal reasons and with considerable sadness.” Reached by phone, he declined to comment.

Because the department’s final finding was that Grayson had made a mistake in his reports, and didn’t say he’d been dishonest, the Sheriff’s Office’s failure to report the issue to the state in the form of a Professional Conduct Report did not violate the law, said Loren Jones of Impact for Equity, a Chicago law and policy nonprofit. Professional Conduct Reports are logged by the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board (ILETSB) in a closed internal database that police departments are required to check when hiring a new officer.

However, Jones wrote in an email, “It’s important to note that agencies have the discretion to report any behavior they think other agencies should be aware of even if the law does not compel them to.

“The Professional Conduct database relies on the integrity and professionalism of each law enforcement agency to report accurately,” she continued. “As this case demonstrates, some agencies are more concerned about protecting the reputation of themselves and their officers than the safety of Illinois citizens. 

She said it would have been “the correct thing to do” for the Logan County Sheriff’s Office to have also submitted a complaint asking for ILETSB to decertify Grayson for dishonesty, but that “it seems like they decided to let Grayson’s behavior slide.”

“What happened to Sonya Massey is shining a glaring light on policy changes that need to be made if we are serious about holding the police accountable in Illinois,” Jones said.

Landers has refused to answer questions since Grayson was charged with murder.

New rules for decertifications recently proposed by ILETSB don’t address how the agency intends to ensure agencies accurately report information about misconduct. Officials with the agency didn’t respond to a request for comment.

After he left the Logan County Sheriff’s Office “in good standing,” Grayson was hired by the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office in May 2023. Former Sheriff Jack Campbell said that no significant issues came up during his agency’s background investigation, which was later criticized by legal experts. His replacement, former Springfield Police Lt. Paula Crouch, has said she intends to significantly overhaul the office’s hiring process.

But Lowe knows hers isn’t the only case connected to Grayson that has had issues. In September, Invisible Institute, IPM News and Illinois Times reported a story about a resident of Kincaid, a village in Christian County, whom Grayson arrested without evidence. 

Since the state voluntarily dropped Lowe’s charges without further comment on Grayson in court, Elisabeth Pollock, the Champaign County public defender, speculates prosecutors may have doubted the case’s strength.

“My guess is that when the state is going back and reviewing all of the files that this deputy [Grayson] was involved in, they’re picking through his actions with a fine-tooth comb,” Pollock said. 

“My thought is that they feared that on appeal or in some future proceeding this incident would be brought up, which may cause a reversal of the conviction anyway,” she added. 

Lowe said she’s hoping more people like her will get another chance at life. 

“I hope that they throw [out] all the cases for the people that he stopped illegally because it’s not right for any of them,” Lowe said. “Regardless, guilty or not guilty.” 

Despite the dropped charges, Lowe struggles to pick up where she left off

While Sean Grayson was able to continue on to the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office shortly after arresting and allegedly harassing her, Lowe said she’s only now picking up her life. 

While in jail, she lost her home and all her belongings — including the only photos she had of her son as a baby. She’s now living with her mom, seeing her son, who’s now 9, several times a week. Although she wants to move into her own place, she’s struggled to find work, even at a grocery store, due to the felony conviction that remains on her record.

All her belongings are in a storage unit she can’t afford, Lowe said, and soon they’ll be auctioned off to the highest bidder. The items inside — from furniture to her son’s artwork — are remnants of the life she had before her arrest.

“For two years, I thought I was going to prison, so my work was affected, my emotional state was affected, my time with my child was affected,” Lowe said. “I lost everything. I lost my house. I mean, everything, everything I had, was gone, it’s all gone.”

Before her case was dropped, Lowe said she was prepared to leave her son and family behind. Now, she said, she’s focused on rebuilding.

“I’m hoping I can get a fresh start, get my own place again, get myself to where I need to be, and get my son home,” she said.

This story was produced in collaboration between Invisible Institute, a nonprofit public accountability journalism organization based in Chicago, and Illinois Public Media News, the NPR/PBS member station based in Champaign-Urbana. 

Farrah Anderson is an Investigative Reporting Fellow with Invisible Institute and Illinois Public Media. Follow her on X at @farrahsoa or email her at farrah2@illinois.edu. 

Sam Stecklow is an investigative journalist and FOIA fellow with Invisible Institute. Follow him on X at @samstecklow or email him at sam@invisibleinstitute.com.